First Steeking

Steeking: the deliberate cutting of a piece of knitted fabric to create openings. Also something that, like sex, is quite intimidating to interested parties who've never actually tried it, which is what I was till recently.

Oh I hadn't planned it that way--I had planned to have a Holiday Vest for this winter and finished knitting a big colorful cylinder in early November. Moved right on to the Wintergarden kit with plans to use the vest as a "dry run" for the whole steeking concept before doing it on Something Fancy like the Wintergarden sweater.

Well.

My "holiday vest" sat on top of my sewing machine through all ofNovember, all of Advent, all of Christmastide and now some of Ordinary Time too. I had already decided that it was my "practice piece" for both two-color work and steeking and had therefore given myself permission to totally screw it up and even end up with a very brightly decorated cat-bed if need be. Didn't care one little bit if I ended up with yarn spaghetti, either.

So it wasn't the whole "fear" thing holding me back...but I wasn't sure what was holding me back. I belatedly realized that it was the sewing-machine bit that was the rate-limiting step: no good place or time to set the thing up and actually do the stitching. Coincidentally right after I made that discovery my knitting newsgroup started up a steeking conversation which made the whole process sound very do-able.

On the night of the new moon I said "fuck that sewing shit entirely," grabbed a pair of scissors and just whacked through the thing. Guess what? Nothing bad happened.

This is what happened:

Here's a closeup of the star pattern:

Oh sure, the yarn was very slippery (holiday acrylic with that plastic gilt thread and stash cotton) and wanted to unravel for a stitch or two at the cut edges but it wasn't anything major andit was easily hidden in a rolled edge, which is what I did to secure the undersides.

Whacked through the underarms and just rolled those too...see?

I was all about "git 'er DONE!" when I picked up the scissors and I'm glad of it. However in the future I would definitely plan my facings and cutting better since the inside of this piece has a very cobbled-together look:

The front edges are also rather thicker than I'd like but for my First Steeking it was overall a pretty good experience...better than my First Sex was.